Friday, 18 December 2015

You may or may not have noticed that "professional skeptic" Sam Harris has turned his attention toward Buddhism, but --oddly-- his response to it is not skeptical at all. Instead, he's also in the long tradition of scientistic thinkers who remain balefully ignorant of canonical Buddhism (or even of village Buddhist praxis) who is eager to tie together a knot of "cognitive" claims, and call it modern ("secular") meditation.

Another product of my prolific "jet-lagged in Göttingen" period (recorded at about 4:30 AM, local time), on Youtube: https://youtu.be/MmH-tma1upY

This one is not about the meaning of life, but about friendship as the smallest unit of social organization, and as crucially important to political action of any kind. On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UezI3u8iXA

Thursday, 17 December 2015

Why do vegans hate those who eat less meat, rather than none at all? While guys like Tobias Leenaert try to take a more conciliatory approach, there are some pretty clear reasons as why the conflict continues. On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1nHrC8Wsgs

Wednesday, 16 December 2015

There are not many vegans in Göttingen, and I find it interesting that the only vegan restaurant here uses the English language on its signs, and identifies itself with a (broadly western) set of human-rights ideals; it would be easy to imagine some other world in which veganism (in Europe) was packaged in terms of Chinese cultural ideals, or some Prakritic tradition from India.

However, in terms of what is available at the grocery-store, the situation is better for vegans than almost anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. I suspect this is, partly, just because the market for the lactose-intolerant is so well-established here (many of the soy products are for them more than they are for "us", as vegans). The other aspect is simply that the Germans care about fruit and vegetables year round (what's available here, in winter, is better than what I could get when I was living in France).

Tuesday, 8 December 2015

A monologue covering controversial issues that --frankly-- I think many academics wish they could discuss freely (but they can't, so they won't: there's a pall of silence precisely where critical attention is most urgently needed). On Youtube: https://youtu.be/za4w_jWeZsA

Tuesday, 10 November 2015

This is exactly what we've failed to create in Canada --at any level of education. Of course, I'd be delighted if/when I find any examples to the contrary, but I now have a great deal of experience with getting e-mails back from language programs for Ojibwe and Cree (here in Canada) writing back to let me know that they don't really offer the sort of courses that they seem to (in hype posted to the internet).

Thursday, 5 November 2015

I let my stubble grow for a few days, so that I'd look appropriately rough for my passport photos. No joke: you want your identity photos to resemble what you're (probably) going to look like after 24+ hours in transit.

Tuesday, 27 October 2015

No matter where you're living in the world, you may have heard that the
dairy industry is supported by the government, and the prices are
artificially low… or artificially high… or you may have heard both.
What's going on here? Is there a government conspiracy to make pizza
cheaper? Well… sort of.

Sunday, 25 October 2015

Dear Mr Mazard,thanks for your interest in our Master Program in Buddhist Studies which has several tracks, among them tracks for Japanese and Indian Buddhism. As our Program has a strong philological orientation you will need to prove solid language skills in either Japanese or Sanskrit. Generally our Master students have gone through 4 years of intensive language training in their Bachelor.If you you are interested in the Master Program in more detail, please let me know about your work done so far in Sanskrit or, in case you are interested in the track "Japan", contact my colleague … Best wishes from _____,

----------------------------------------

Prof. _____,

I have had something like 10 years of experience working on Pali (and my work in that field is well-known, partly because I produced educational materials as a by-product of my own research, and these materials are now used by other students of Pali). However, I have zero experience
with Sanskrit, and I actively intend to never study Sanskrit. So, if the Indian side of your program works entirely on Sanskrit (not on Pali), then it is of no interest to me.

Friday, 11 September 2015

Veganism vs. Human Rights (the Politics of Putting Humanitarianism "First"). This includes anecdotes "from the field", concerning my own supposedly-humanitarian work in Laos, along with the broader theoretical point (about being a vegan in a world at war, etc.).

Saturday, 5 September 2015

The Japanese board-game 人生ゲーム has given rise to many, many adaptations. Some of them can be used for level 1 language-practice (some with more Kanji than others, etc.). All of them make use of exactly the sort of vocabulary that beginners need to learn (and practice), i.e., basic terms related to work, study, life, etc. etc.

Click below to see marriage, Japanese style, according to "The Game of Life".

Friday, 28 August 2015

This is an image of a "sinkhole" apparently created by (1) collapsing permafrost, and (2) escaping methane gas (but, as the narrator notes, this is a new area of scientific research, and how the sinkholes are formed by rising temperatures is not entirely understood). Methane is a crucially important variable for understanding arctic climate-change, and you can find various instructive videos on this topic created by members of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG).

Saturday, 22 August 2015

[景色] My Life in Canada: UVic Campus [カナダの都市部]
Not a masterpiece of film-making (nor of social commentary), but this does show the scenery here on campus, partly for the benefit of some of my friends and colleagues far away, who may have trouble imagining what this part of Canada looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dt0Hwr91Vs

Sunday, 16 August 2015

Life in Victoria, B.C., proceeds at a slow pace, even for the ravens. Some of them cope with their boredom by tormenting the humans who pass them by. This year, for a few months, there was one raven who perched in the rafters of the Market Square (a public quadrangle, downtown). He/she passed the time by swooping down to pass his/her claws through the hair of people walking up a particular (outdoor) staircase.

Thursday, 13 August 2015

While I was in Taiwan, it did seem to me that the younger generation had taken an increasing interest in the islands next-door, with English being (absurdly) the lingua franca linking the two cultures (note that I lived in Taiwan at several different odd junctures of my life, for some number of months on each occasion, so I have only a fragmented sense of how the culture has changed, but still, this seemed new and noteworthy; during my first period of living in Taipei, many years ago, Japan seemed distant and rarely-thought-of). The change shows up in the statistics as a significant leap in the numbers of tourists going from Taiwan to Japan (cf. the second chart, below: the growth is not in business-travelers); however, the feeling is not mutual. Japanese interest in Taiwan has increased, but only modestly, during the same period of time.

China has some remarkable economic problems, but rapidly rising public
spending isn't their root cause. This video shows how a single
statistic in isolation can be very misleading, and how some
opinion-makers may be trying to mislead us with factoids of this kind.

Although I've had some of my work translated into Chinese intentionally, this is the first time I've noticed that someone translated my work into Chinese without asking for my permission (and without even telling me that they were doing it).

Leadership is created by followership: vegans tends to select certain
types of charismatic leaders, in the absence of any institutional
structure for their ecological and ethical interests (that could have,
hypothetically, been shaped by the Green Party, Greenpeace or other
institutions, that have thus far failed to take on any such leadership
role). This video raises broad questions of who our leaders are (how
and why we select them), examining the type of leadership that results
from internet-centered activism in the 21st century.

What is the future of Veganism? What is the new vegan social movement
emerging from Northern Thailand? What does the recent scandal have to
tell us (or what does it lead us to ask ourselves) about these larger
issues?